At eXo, I’m in charge of the collaboration & knowledge management tools included in eXo Platform. Our team is responsible for the development of a tool suite helping users to be more productive, easily share their knowledge and foster innovation and collaboration.

With the upcoming release of eXo Platform 3.5, we’ve been working on amazing new features that will help you build a powerful and engaging social intranet.

The objective with this new version was both to improve the user experience and introduce new features. Since the tools we develop are targeted at end-users, we put a special effort to craft functional and enjoyable user interfaces. In this new version, we also wanted to add a new tool for sharing knowledge which is why we introduce a brand new enterprise Wiki. We already use it internally in our own company intranet, and it’s been a great success! We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.

In this post, I will unveil the exciting new enterprise wiki, and describe other new features that will be available in the upcoming eXo Platform 3.5 release.

Enterprise Wiki

We’ve talked about adding a wiki to eXo Platform for a few years now, and lot of work has been done to get there. Our hard work has paid of and I am proud to introduce our enterprise Wiki. It is simple, user-centered and fully integrated with eXo Platform 3.5.

The wiki is an exceptionally useful and powerful tool for sharing knowledge and collaborating on documents. Its simplicity and customizable UI makes it very accessible to all types of users. It is also the most flexible tool we have built so far. Whatever you want to do, the wiki can accommodate.

Easy Start:

Before creating your wiki content, you can choose one of the wiki page templates to start with a clean and structured page. We also introduced an advanced WYSIWYG editor to let users edit content without knowledge of any wiki syntax. Wikis are sometimes a little difficult to understand and their adoption is probably not what they deserve. Therefore, we made sure to keep the wiki in eXo Platform 3.5 simple and easy to use from the start!

Stay Informed:

Everybody likes to keep track of new content or edits to important documents. The “watch” feature can send email notifications and post notification on your activity stream when a wiki page is modified. Once a change is made, you can track it, compare it with a previous version, and revert it if necessary.

Advanced Content:

The wiki provides all the tools you need to create amazing advanced content. It lets you use a set of macros to organize the content of your wiki pages. Not enough for you? You can create your own macros and take advantage of our extensible macro engine!

Finally, I let you discover the complete list of features that will be provided in the eXo Platform 3.5 wiki:

User Interface: Clean, simple and user-centered.

Advanced Editors: Edit wiki pages with the easy to use XWiki WYSIWYG editor or directly with wiki markup.

Advanced Search: Find content in the wiki with an advanced search system.

Bookmarkable Content: Bookmark any page by using the available permanent bookmarkable URL.

Attachments: Manage every type of attachment for any wiki page.

Social Integration: Update activity streams when wiki pages are created or modified.

A video is often better than words, so check out the screencast:

Calendar:

Remote Calendars:

In eXo Platform 3.5, you’ll be able to connect your other online calendars, such as Google Calendar or Yahoo Calendar, to your work calendars in an eXo-based social intranet. Simply provide an ICS URL and eXo Platform will synchronize them automatically via CalDAV.

Task Management:

Many people have adopted “Getting Things Done“ or other similar methods to help manage and prioritize their day-to-day work. So to let users manage theirs tasks with eXo Platform 3.5, we created a simple task management tool, with due date, reminders and delegation management. It’s simple and efficient, especially when sharing tasks with your teams within a social intranet.

Chat:

Notifications:

When coworkers are online at the same time, instant messaging can be much more efficient than sending emails. You can now receive notifications directly within the social intranet’s built-in chatbar about status availability of your colleagues.

Forum:

Fresh New Design:

Forum has a lot of improves in its look and feel. It’s now really slick, simple with light colors and a lot of useful improvements that your users will love for creating discussions with their communities.

Wiki Syntax Support:

As we work a lot on the Wiki, we also provide it a good integration all our collaborations tools. You can create a topic, and simply paste the content of a wiki page.

Address Book:

Permission Management:

Managing the permissions of address books you share with other users is another improvement you’ll find in eXo Platform 3.5. You can grant read-only access and manage the access rights of public address books for users, groups or memberships within your social intranet.

Mail Client:

Email Account Delegation:

Mail accounts can now be delegated to other users within your social intranet. This has been a frequently requested feature in corporate environments, either for executive assistant delegation or for teams operating on functional mailboxes. A mailbox’s access permissions can be restricted to read-only if required.

Advanced Document Management Integration:

You can now add resources stored in the Content Management System directly from the Mail client. If your recipient has access to the eXo server, you can also decide to simply include a link to the server file instead of attaching the full content. Finally, when you save an attachment, you can save it on the server, in any of your drives.

These new features are just the tip of the iceberg. There will be many more to discover in eXo Platform 3.5. We believe that these tools will drastically improve your collaboration experience as you will have one single productivity platform for all your applications and collaborators.

In the following post, we’ll explain how we integrated these different tools within the Social Intranet to make them even more engaging and useful.